Cities increasingly brand themselves as an attractive place for tourists, investors, business and workforce. Yet, most place branding efforts do not take the diversity of their stakeholders and the variety of place perceptions into account. Our study, however, reveals significant discrepancies between internal and external stakeholders’ mental representations of a place brand, using the city of Hamburg as an example. We therefore argue that place brand management needs to align its brand communication with stakeholders’ interests, using an integrated approach to developing city-specific strategies for building target group-specific place brand architecture.

compete strongly with each other for attracting tourists, investors,
companies, or talents. Place marketers therefore focus more and more on establishing the city
as a brand and to promote their city to its different target groups. But the perception of a city
(brand) can differ dramatically between those groups. Thus, place branding research should
emphasize much more the city brand perceptions of the different target groups and develop
strategies for cities on how to build an advantageous place brand architecture vis-à-vis its
stakeholders.
In this regards, we show in two empirical studies – 40 qualitative in-depth-interviews (Study
1) and an online qualitative open-ended-question survey with 334 participants (Study 2) – using
network analysis the important discrepancies between the city brand perceptions in the mental
representation of different target groups for the example of the city of Hamburg. Furthermore,
practical implications for place marketers are discussed.